“I’ve handcuffed Jer to Tatum. She’s stronger than she looks, and I’ve taught her how to chokehold him if necessary. He struggled at first but he understands what’s happening and ultimately allowed it. They’re playing cards by flashlight, in a cave about a mile southeast ofhere.”
Just then, the sound of hot gassy fire went off behind me, and I followed Josephine’s wide-eyed gaze to see Dawn take out another handful of front linegrunts.
“Oh yeah, they can breathe fire now and are on our side,” Iexplained.
She just nodded, mouth agape. “Well, all right. You take the big boy on the left and I’ll get this flesh eater to myright.”
I followed her gaze and blanched. A sentry had broken free from the chaos of flaming grunts and was coming right for me. Next to him was a grunt, and farther to the right was another sentry that Josephine was going to take careof.
“Got him,” I told her and ran to meet him. I’d let the grunt through so Damien could test his armcuff.
I’d been training with the samurai swords since I was twelve, the day Master Aki plucked me from a fight in the Dream Wars and told me to call his dojo in San Francisco when I woke up. I trained at the academy on the weekdays and at his dojo on the weekends for six years. The hyperloop made the normally six-hour drive into a thirty-minute ride, in a pod that traveled at speeds upward of 700 miles anhour.
I holstered my guns, which were pretty useless with the sentries, and pulled my blades. The light titanium was razor sharp. I traveled every three months so they could be sharpened by Master Aki himself. They had built-in blue lights in the hilt so I could find them in the dark, and the lights ran along the blade so that no matter the conditions, I could see what I wasfighting.
The normally stoic sentry’s face was a grimace of fury. I surmised that he didn’t like that the Galadrias were helpingus.
When I was within a few feet of him, I dropped to the ground, sliding under him on my shins. They moved fast but I could use that to my advantage, as it took them a second to figure things out and correct their move. He’d been so hell-bent on plowing into me and taking my head off, that when I slid under him, it took him too long to stop his momentum and turn around. I had already popped up behind him and launched myself onto his back, gripping his gigantic rib cage with my thighs. I locked my ankles in front of his abdomen, pulled both swords up and then brought them down in front of his face, jamming them into hisneck.
A gargled scream tore from his serrated mouth, and before I could pull my arm back, he bit me. A sharp pain sliced into my forearm, and then the distinct acid burn worked its way deep into my bone. I couldn’t help but cry out in pain as he tried to inhale my arm as if it were asnack.
Freaking vampire zombiemotherfucker!
I lost my grip on one sword when he bit down on that hand, but I yanked my other sword out of his neck, instead shoving it into his cheek. I had to do so carefully to avoid cutting off my own arm, which was trapped in his mouth, but if I didn’t think fast he was going to rip it off and ingestit.
It worked. The sword going through his cheek was enough to loosen his teeth and open his mouth a little. At the same time, Damien appeared, running full blast at the sentry with his arm cuff outstretched. I yanked my injured arm out of the sentry’s mouth while it was busy staring at Damien, gauging the threat. I was about to jump off him when all of a sudden, an invisible wall shot out of Damien’s cuff like a glass concave shield. The sentry’s body became a live wire and an electrical current ripped through me. I yelped and fell off, trying to keep my remaining sword from flying up and cutting my own head off. The sentry shrieked, like a thousand bats being burned alive, and leapt backward, his steel-toed foot crashing into my shin as he stumbled over my crumpled body and fell to theground.
Holy shit. Holy freaking end the Dream Wars shit. It worked. The damn cuffworked!
Damien stepped forward, placing one strong hand on my inner thigh and the other under my armpit, then hauling me over his shoulder with my butt in the air, backing upslowly.
“It worked!” I said breathlessly. The bite pain was working its way into my nervous system. Ghoul saliva was a neurotoxin, and I was going to be majorly screwed if Ronnie couldn’t work her magic quickly. It also dissolved human flesh in under twenty-four hours, so if I wanted to keep my arm, we needed to get the hell out of here and wakeup.
I looked down at the wound and was relieved to see it was a pretty clean bite. I’d fought my initial instinct to tear my arm out of his mouth, which helped keep the skin and flesh on the bone. There were only about fifty puncture marks, but at least nothing was hanging off or anything crazy. I quickly pulled the rip cord above my elbow to activate my suit’s built-in tourniquet. The tightening hurt but it also cut off the blood flow, for which I wasgrateful.
“It did,” Damien responded, a bit shocked. From my ass-in-the-air, upside-down view, I could see Josephine had pulverized her sentry, but now the ghouls were in a panic. Maxine and Brisk could no longer keep them back with the Galadria fire, and they were a stampede, running toward us. Nox had managed to scale the side of the slick rock facade and was raining fire bombs down on them, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the hundred-plusgrunts.
Josephine, who was about a hundred feet from us, grabbed Mr. Hansen and they booked it for the forest. Smart girl. I hoped she’d take Ronnie too. We were deep into the war zone, with no time to flee and not enough man power tofight.
‘Dawn, take Ronnie and Nox and fly away. Please, if you ever wanted to help me, then do this lastthing.’
Damien lowered me, sliding the length of my body down his chest until I was standing right beforehim.
‘Dawn won’t leave Kit,’sheresponded.
God dammit! Leave it to me to have made some loyal pet aliendragon.
‘Dawn, fly away or you will all die!’I screamed so loud inside my own head that I feared I was goingcrazy.
‘Then Galadrias die. Becomestars.’
Is this suicidal alien dragon getting spiritual onme?
I pulled my gun just as Damien’s hand snaked out and pressed into my lower back, pulling me into him. My hips slammed into his pelvis as my breasts pressed against his chest. If I thought he was trying to make a move, I might’ve slapped him for his forward advance, but I knew better in such a diresituation.
“Hold on,” he breathed into my ear, then held his weaponized cuff out behind my head at the advancingghouls.
He was betting our entire lives on his brother’s device. I just hoped itheld.
